Sunday, August 10, 2014

The present Gaza hostilities will come to an end.There will be no winners.Yes Israel has again shown a willingness to
protect its citizens and its superior ability to do so.Yes Hamas, recently written off, has shown
itself to be alive and far more resourceful than earlier thought. But whatever “successes” each side may claim,
absent resolving the underlying causes of the current conflict and indeed in
reaching a two-state agreement, the most we can expect is yet another limited period
of artificial calm.Given the political
realities on both sides, it’s hard to be optimistic, perhaps harder than ever.

Among the casualties of this particular conflict is
Israel’s relationship with its most ardent and generous supporter, the United
States.As an American Jew that pains
me, but let’s not pretend it just happened.The claimed deterioration began on the day Barack Obama took office. Bibi Netanyahu, who spent many years here and
is more aligned with conservative Republicans, would vastly have preferred John
McCain.In fact, while he
denied it, Israel’s prime minister was accused of trying to interfere with
our presidential election in 2012.No
need, his loyal friend and soul mate, the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson,
took up the cause, pouring millions into trying unsuccessively, to unseat
Obama. And who can forget Bibi’s year
earlier lengthy televised schoolteacher
lecturing our president — my president — during their post meeting Oval
Office photo op?Given the general
protocol of such occasions, the Hebrew word Hutzpah
comes to mind.So, too, with similar lecturing just days ago
when, regarding Hamas, Bibi told
the White House, “not to ever second guess me again”.

Encouraged by the AIPAC crowd, it seems that Israel’s
current government expects not only support but also ask-no-questions
support.John Kerry, one of its most
reliable and longtime friends, is now being dissed because, in working to bring
about a peace, he has tried to be an honest broker.And of course liberal Jewish writers (with
whom I associate myself) — the likes of Roger Cohen, Ezra Klein, Jonathan Chait
and Peter Beinart who dare criticize Israeli policies — are the objects of
particular scorn, characterized as disloyal. This week the influential conservative Israeli
writer Shmuel Rozner lashed out at us in a blistering NY Times op-ed entitled “Israel’s
Fare Weather Friends”. “If all Jews
are a family”, he wrote, “it would be natural for Israelis to expect the
unconditional love of their non-Israeli Jewish kin. If Jews aren’t a family, and their support can
be withdrawn, then Israelis have no reason to pay special attention to the
complaints of non-Israeli Jews.”I guess
his definition of “unconditional love” and mine are not aligned.To me, and I’d guess for the named writers, honest
criticism is often the truest expression of real, yes family, love.When King David engineered the death of a
rival, the prophet Nathan (2 Samuel 12:7) called his kin-king to task: “you are
the (guilty) man”. What might Rozner have said to
and of Nathan?

I have no doubt that Israel will survive our criticism
and moreover that our voiced concerns will ultimately support that survival as
much or more than all of AIPAC and Sheldon Adelson’s unconditional cheers.What Israel is less likely to survive, or to
survive as a democratic Jewish state, is failing to end the untenable and, in
my view, unsustainable status quo. Nor
should the descendants of prophets — truth tellers and exponents of “tell it
like it is” moral outrage — allow their contemporary narrative to be one of
subjugators and occupiers without end.The repeated bloody confrontation with Gaza only underscores that point.Is Hamas manipulating its citizenry for their
own purposes?Absolutely, but the
continued virtual imprisonment of
this highly populated piece of geography is providing fertile ground for both
desperation and anger.

Returning for a moment to Israel’s relationship with
us.One of the things that sparked
Bibi’s outrage was that Obama joined others including the UN in criticizing
Israel’s killing of civilians, especially children.I think we all watched in horror as these
casualties mounted, just as we have during other conflicts in other
places.I am sure the president was
expressing his personal discomfort as much as that of our government.At the same time, and here the Israelis do have
a point, there is something disingenuous about our and others selective
expression of outrage.Remember people
in glass houses.

When the United States retaliated for the September
11th attacks, it dropped many bombs on Afghanistan ostensibly to
wipe out al Qaeda and the Taliban.For
sure, many more civilians including children lost their lives then and in
subsequent assaults, than have in Gaza.When George W. Bush and company rained down “shock and awe” on Iraq— a war against a manufactured “enemy” that
had not attacked us — many thousands more innocent lives (including children)
were lost.Those losses are so large
that we can’t even account for them.When President Obama authorized drone strikes, so-called precise tools
of destruction, there have been unintended fatalities including children.Are we the only guilty parties in this regard?Of course, not.So-called unintended consequences, the loss
of human beings we callously call “collateral damage” are the bi-product of any
and all wars.Bloodguilt is a universal.We should all feel a sense of outrage when
innocents die in Gaza, but so too should be feel the same when they die in
other places and at our hand.More
important, we shouldn’t burden another country, friend or foe, with judgments
we’re not willing to make of ourselves.Israel
often finds itself with just such a burden, one that is less than even-handed.

We all know what might solve the Israel/Palestine
problem.The lines of the two states
have long been drawn and the path to peace laid out in multiple negotiations,
most recently led by our Secretary of State.But, as President
Obama said of many conflicts in his excellent one-hour interview with Tom
Friedman, the parties have to be willing.No one can, or should, do it for them.He also pointed out that the Near East region in particular was undoing
an order that had been imposed (often without regard to history) after World
War I.Well the United Nations, for very
good and compelling reasons, imposed partition on what was then Palestine,
setting up what was to be two states, one Jewish and one Arab.The Jews accepted, creating the State of
Israel, the Arabs rejected going on the attack.That’s a historic fact, but who started what and when is ultimately
irrelevant when the shooting stops.The
only question then, is how the post-conflict world will look.

Again, it’s pretty well known what that will or
should be.So why isn’t it
happening?I think the answer lies
largely in the fact that both Israel and its Palestinian counterpart (The
Palestinian Authority) are prevented from doing the obvious by militant
fundamentalists who may not be a majority but nonetheless currently hold the
balance of power.When I use the term
fundamentalist here it is not entirely in a religious context, though that
certainly pertains.I’m talking rather
about a fundamentalism grounded in long past history or tradition.It’s what our own Justice Scalia calls
“originalism”. Among both Israelis and
Palestinians there are those who hold a strong conviction that, by all
rights, the whole of the land belongs to them.Especially orthodox Jews, but some others as
well, see the entire Holy Land as
their rightful historic home, promised to them by no lesser than God. On the other hand, Arabs look to centuries of
their history concluding that they are entitled to that same whole.Both, in effect, reject partition as
arbitrary and synthetic.For them, no mediation
can legitimize what is fundamentally wrong — no one can undo Divine Will.

You and I may not agree with this position.We may see Israel/Palestine in a contemporary
context and with a worldview that not only accepts but also embraces
change.In many respects, all maps are
synthetic and in their own way arbitrary.Borders have long been the source of conflict but also are necessary as
the defined lines to facilitate peaceful co-existence.Most importantly, while many in the world
that we call home may adhere to one or another religion, even devoutly so, we
don’t generally see borders and territory as by divine right.We may in this country be facing some issues
about borders with regard to immigration, but even the most right wing among us
don’t think God gave Texas or New Mexico to the United States.

Looking at the world today, the underlying conflict
that we see in so many places is grounded in a tug of war between yesterday and
today, past and future.Those who cling
to the “good old days” however defined, see their known world, the place they
could count on, turning into sand slipping through their fingers.They are desperate to hold on.That’s true with the creationists and climate
deniers here in America.It’s true for
those who refuse to admit (to themselves) that our history isn’t one of a racial
or ethnic homogeneity but rather that we are all children of immigrants, people
of diversity many of whom came illegally.So it is with Israel/Palestine where noble histories and holding on to a
dream long since gone cloud rationality and pragmatic solutions.That’s what makes embracing the obvious so
very difficult, but hopefully not impossible.

Friday, August 1, 2014

Oh that uppity president, how to rid ourselves of this
embarrassment?Forget about two
elections — let’s sue.It’s time to
finally challenge the imperial presidency,
a travesty on its own but all the more so with this interloper, this illegitimate
holder of our office.What are the grounds for this suit authorized by the House?That Barack Obama has subverted Congress in
using his pen — his executive orders — to alter passed legislation.Let’s not even mention that the specific
legislation in question is laughably the ACA, their Enemy #1.

To some degree we should be grateful to the Tea
Party dominated House.They are
providing an opportunity to consider and assess White House abuse of power and
the so-called Imperial Presidency.We’ve often been told both by legislators and
some in the media that the imperiousness of our chief executives has reached
new heights of late.Interestingly no
one really challenges that notion, one that has no factual basis — quite the
contrary.As it happens, we do have an
objective measure of relative imperiousness, one that has been tracked from the start:
the executive order.George Washington
issued a modest eight, more than any other until Andrew Jackson who issued
twelve.That number swelled dramatically
with U.S. Grant (217) a level that was not reached again until it was dwarfed
by Teddy Roosevelt (1,081) who in turn was topped by his cousin Franklin (3,522).

To put Obama’s executive order record in context,
let’s look at what happened in the 20th Century beginning with TR
and ending with Bill Clinton.In that
period, 13,499 executive orders were issued with FDR (3,522) setting a still
standing record and George HW Bush with the fewest (166).On average the seventeen presidents of the
last century each issued 794 executive orders but given the inclusion of both
Roosevelts and varying terms of service, that number is clearly
misleading.A more telling one is how
many each president issued in a single year — 124.Since it’s the House Republicans who want to
sue for what they claim is presidential overreach, let’s finally look at the
record of recent Republican presidents: Ronald Reagan and the two Bush’s.
Together they averaged 279 executive orders each or 41 for every year in
office.

Drum roll please.Barack Obama, the “imperial president” worthy of a lawsuit — the first
of its kind — has issued a total of 183 executive orders at the rate of 33 per
year.This compares with an average of 794
for the 20th Century presidents (124 a year) and 279 (41 each year)
for his three Republican predecessors including the GOP’s conservative hero
Ronald Reagan.In fact, when it comes to
so-called “legislating on his own” Obama does it less often than any chief
executive since Theodore Roosevelt.Let’s repeat that, “less than any”.

My apologies for all the numbers but they explain my
outrage about the action taken this week, one that fails to meet the most basic
smell test.Indeed, what the House did
was no less than an election year publicity stunt, one that may never be
followed by tangible legal action.Their
aim, one that has been echoed by Senator McConnell in the upper chamber, is to
undo this presidency, if not in the polling booth where they have been unsuccessful
then in causing paralysis in Washington.What we’re witnessing in America is not an imperial presidency, not
presidential overreach, but a politics of hate.Bill Clinton, another interloper, was the object of such hate when he
had the audacity to run for and be twice
elected president.The specter of a
fabricated Whitewater “scandal” raised its head even before the he took his
oath of office.George W. Bush who,
unlike Barack Obama, actually did enter office under a cloud of illegitimacy,
engendered if not hate then certainly impassioned resentment.It seems Democrats are not quite as good at
hate as Republicans.And then this
chief executive, who carries not merely the burden of not coming of one of our
political royal families but from the
wrong kind of family, is threatened with a
bogus lawsuit.

Looking ahead to November, we’re told that
Republicans have a better than even chance of taking over the Senate and, of
course, making further gains in the House.This would suggest that their theater and relentless campaign of
misinformation is working.It leaves me
dumbfounded.I am outraged by this
systematic attempt to undo an elected president and to put all of our needs —
and there are many — on hold while those being paid to do “the people’s work”
spend most of their time saying “no” while attempting to deconstruct.Where is the outrage of the American
people?Are we to assume that people
like Ted Cruz speak for them, that total gridlock is what they want?Are we to assume that, despite all our
advances, they still see large swathes of the population as second or third
class citizens?The current atmosphere would
suggest that is so. i continue to hope it is not.

For the moment, as you can see, I’m mad as hell.Think I’ll call my lawyers.

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About Me

A branding consultant with decades of experience working with large global clients and brands, he now serves primarily young startup companies. Beginning his professional life as a rabbi of a large urban congregation, he has watched the numbers of the religiously unaffiliated grow in the years since leaving the pulpit. His book, Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars (available on Amazon) considers this phenomenon. Beyond his consulting practice Prinz spends much of his time writing, including this Blog. He posts to "Beyond All That" only when there is something to say that might add value to the conversation.